Grace Thornton had been part of my life since before I knew I needed her.
When Mia was seven, she hit a baseball through Grace's kitchen window. I remember standing on Grace's porch with the ball in one hand and my daughter hiding behind my legs, practicing the apology I was sure I would have to deliver. Grace opened the door, looked at the ball, looked at Mia, and said, "Well, that window was old anyway." She made lemonade. She never billed us.
She grew tomatoes along our shared fence in soil she built up herself over the years. Every August she left bags on my porch with no note, because she knew I would thank her and she hated being thanked. In the bags the tomatoes were still warm from the sun.
When Mia was twelve and going through the phase where she hated everything I cooked, Grace collected our packages so they wouldn't sit on the porch, and then she started collecting Mia too β the girl would drift over after school and sit in Grace's kitchen doing homework while Grace made bread.
Carla got sick the year Mia turned fourteen. The cancer moved fast in the way they warn you about and then it moves faster anyway. I was working nights and trying to be home for the days, and there were weeks when I slept three hours at a stretch and forgot what I had eaten. Grace came twice a week and sat with Carla so I could work a shift without paying a nurse I could not afford. She read to her. She held her hand when the bad hours came. When Carla was too weak to talk, Grace just sat there, the way she had a gift for sitting, like her being in the room was a decision she had made and would not unmake.
After Carla died, Grace brought dinner to our house every Sunday for nearly six months. Casseroles in foil pans. Chicken soup in jars. Once a peach pie with a lattice crust that Mia still talks about, the way other people talk about their grandmother's pie. Grace never stayed long β she would set the food on the counter, ask about school, squeeze my arm, and go. She understood that grief needs feeding more than it needs company.
That was why, watching her paint my roof red, I felt something worse than anger. Anger has a direction. But this was like watching someone you love walk into traffic while you shout and she does not hear you, except she could hear me. She heard every word and kept painting anyway.
Mia felt it too. She stood at the window with her sock feet pressed against the wall and her forehead almost touching the glass, and she kept saying, under her breath, "Mrs. Thornton, what are you doing, what are you doing," the way she used to talk to injured birds she found in the yard.
"Maybe she's sick," Mia said. "Like, actually sick. Brain sick."
"She's painting evenly," I said. "Sick people don't paint evenly."
"Maybe she's on something."
"She doesn't take anything stronger than tea."
"Then why is she doing it?"
I had no answer. I watched Grace cap the can and uncap it between panels, neat and methodical, and I thought about the tar on the first panel. The tar had been spread with a brush, careful strokes, no drips on the frame. The cut cables had been severed at exactly the right points, no fraying, no wasted effort. The cloudy film had been sprayed in a uniform coat. Every one of the incidents had looked like the work of someone who knew what they were doing and took pride in doing it properly.
I had spent two months imagining a stranger. A bored kid. A crooked contractor. My imagination had been thorough and completely wrong, because it had never once gone to the small yellow house behind mine, to the woman who knew how Carla took her tea.
That was the part that hurt. Not the money, though the money was real β hundreds each time, and the insurance letter sitting on the kitchen counter with its new cold sentence about cancellation. Not the hours of sleep I had lost. It was the suspicion, blooming in me even as I watched her, that I had been wrong about something important, that the woman on my roof was not the person I thought she was, and that maybe she had never been.
Mia turned away from the window. She went downstairs without a word. I heard the front door open and close softly, and I knew she was going to stand in the driveway where Grace could see her, where Grace could look down and see the girl she had fed through a funeral winter.
Grace stopped painting. She looked down at Mia. Her hand tightened on the can.
"Mia, honey," she said, "go back inside. It's cold out here."
Mia stayed where she was. "What did our panels do to you?"
Grace was quiet for a long moment. Then she went back to the panel, and the red spray hissed out, and she did not answer.